The Grey Thumb Archives

History

From late 2005 until some time in 2009, a social group met in Cambridge,
Massachusetts and later Silicon Valley to discuss the creation of life.
Picture a drinking club for wannabe Dr. Frankensteins with a severe case of
nerd, and you're pretty close.

What brought these folks together was a shared interest in artificial life, a
small and aggressively interdisciplinary field of study that brings together ideas from
biology, computer science, mathematics, physics, and even philosophy to
attempt to study and even create "life as it could be." Most of the early
work in the field was computational, with Tierra
being widely regarded as the first true attempt to simulate open-ended
evolution in a computer. In the past decade some work has been done to
attempt to create life in actual biochemical media, with most of this work
coming under the related heading of synthetic
biology. Major related areas of study include cellular automata, complex
systems, chaos, thermodynamics, economics, game theory, and combinatorics,
to name just a few.

The name Grey Thumb was a play on "green thumb," referring to skill
at making synthetic ("grey") things grow.

As for why anyone would want to do this the reasons vary from just tinkering,
to harnessing of evolutionary processes to create artificial
intelligence, to the quest to define life in a medium-independent way. Dr.
Christoph Adami of Michigan State University was among those who worked with
early computational artificial life (though he never attended Grey Thumb), and
his TED
talk entitled Finding Life We Can't Imagine deals with the sorts
of questions that might be answered with simulated (?) living systems.

Grey Thumb Boston met monthly across most of its life span, first at a small bar
and restaurant in Central Square in Cambridge and then later at a larger
venue close to MIT. At its peak it boasted almost a hundred attendees at
some meetings. It brought together people as diverse as students and
professors, computer hackers and IT professionals, financial quants and
economists, authors, journalists, philosophers, and even folks with no
related technical background but who just found the ideas cool.

Like many such things, it eventually came to an end -- though I've heard
rumors of attempts to reactivate chapters in New York City and the San
Francisco / Silicon Valley area. A few years after the last meeting I let
the domain lapse and it got gobbled up by a so-called "portal pottie," one
of those fake spam-portals run by domain squatters.

In the last year or two I've thought about it from time to time and regretted
letting its Internet presence fade. A week or so ago I checked the domain on
a whim and... nothing! I did a WHOIS and e-mailed the domain's owner. He'd
let the domain lapse as well, so I paid him the ransom required to wrench it
from the filthy drooling maw of GoDaddy and its "lapsed domain process" or
whatever it's called. A few days later I got an e-mail: "domain transfer
complete," and now here we are.

What follows is as much surviving material as I've been able to find. Thanks
to YouTube most of the lectures that were recorded are still available, and
many of the projects created by Grey Thumb participants are still online as
well.